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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,210 posts.
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How to take smart notes with Org mode
While writing the documentation for Org-roam, it occurred to me that I have things to say that do not belong in the documentation. I wrote Org-roam because Org-mode simply didn’t have the utilities to enable the kind of note-taking workflow I wanted. I don’t want to be prescriptive about how note-taking should be…
11524
Software rendering in 500 lines of bare C++
In this series of articles, I aim to demonstrate how OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal, and DirectX work by writing a simplified clone from scratch. Surprisingly, many people struggle with the initial hurdle of learning a 3D graphics API. To help with this, I have prepared a short series of lectures, after which my students are…
11525
A simple search engine from scratch
*if you include word2vec.
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Good books for deep hacks
For the past few months I’ve been compiling a list of books for a deep dive into interesting technical topics. My theory is that working on projects based on these topics will be like strong individual threads I can weave into epic hacks. This list is basically a curriculum for decades of learning about the wonders of…
11527
Go Performance Tales
This entry is cross-posted on the datadog blog . If you want to learn more about Datadog or how we deal with the mountain of data we receive, check it out!
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Damn Cool Algorithms: Log structured storage (2009)
Typically, if you're designing a storage system - such as a filesystem, or a database - one of your major concerns is how to store the data on disk. You have to take care of allocating space for the objects to be stored, as well as storing the indexing data; you have to worry about what happens when you want to extend…
11529
HTTP/2 Continuation Flood: Technical Details
Preface In October 2023 I learned about HTTP/2 Rapid Reset attack, dubbed “the largest DDoS attack to date”. I didn’t have deep knowledge of HTTP/2 back then. I knew its basics like frames or HPACK but I was focusing more on HTTP/1.1 protocol and programming languages vulnerabilities. I decided to dedicate time to…
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John Nash's Letter to the NSA
The National Security Agency (NSA) has recently declassified an amazing letter that John Nash sent to it in 1955. It seems that around the year 1950 Nash tried to interest some US security organs …
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Locked doors, headaches, and intellectual need
You know those things that, once you learn about them for the first time, you start seeing them absolutely everywhere? Recently, that’s been my experience with problem-solution ordering issues. They keep cropping up: not just in the context of gam...
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Is Iceland getting ready to join the EU?
A new change in Iceland’s government means that joining the EU is back on the cards for Iceland.
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How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?
Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks. With specfp, Sun managed to increase its score on 179.art (a sub-benchmark of specfp) by 12x with a compiler tweak that…
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“But the SEC let us go public” and other flawed arguments in Coinbase's defense
Coinbase is trotting out its usual flawed arguments now that it's facing a lawsuit from the SEC, and more pushback is needed.
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Sick of Ruby, dynamic typing, side effects, and object-orientation (2014)
This has been a long time coming. I had meant to write this post around the New Year, before the wave of death of Ruby stuff and before DHH’s “ TDD is dead ” ruckus:
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Why Common Lisp is now the best programming language
just a diary
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One year of cycling to work
Exactly on this day, one year ago, I came back from a one month long trip to Taiwan, went straight to work from the airport and immediately moved into a new apartment after work. Since then I have cycled to work nearly every day.
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An Internet of PHP
Statistics and anecdotes about PHP at scale.
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Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth
A long long rant about my continued frustration with today's Apple. Nothing new, really.
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Statistics, we have a problem
Recently, while browsing Twitter, I saw a few machine learning researchers post about an incident at one of their big conferences (NIPS) in…
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Please Pay for a Year of Nothing
This morning, two emails came in from Apple. The first was about the upcoming renewal of my yearly subscription to Disney+ and the second email was about the price increase of my Disney+ subscription from $79.99 to $109.99. It took me all of 10 seconds to think about it, but I canceled my subscription. It’s not really…
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AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing
In 2022, it actually makes sense to build your own infrastructure for scientific computing if you're a university, NASA, or a growing bio company.
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A misleading open letter about sci-fi AI dangers ignores the real risks
Misinformation, labor impact, and safety are all risks. But not in the way the letter implies.
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Cautionary tale on using Chase bank for indie business
A cautionary tale of a business owner's nightmare with Chase Bank, revealing crucial banking lessons for entrepreneurs.
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Experience Report: 6 months of Go
A report of my positive and negative experiences with Go after using it for 6 months at work.
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Management by metrics leads us astray
Let’s say my goal this year is to get to 10k monthly recurring revenue (MRR).
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Measuring the sloppiness of code
Exploring how to measure code sloppiness, why correct code can still erode a codebase, and why human intuition and taste still matter.
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Job Hunt
This is a story about finding a job as a senior software engineer in Toronto - with a twist: just having moved there from Germany.